Abstract
Crop protection against pests and diseases is a major challenge in agriculture. Plant breeding is a key solution for the development of disease resistant cultivars. Gene editing is an indispensable part of plant breeding to obtain desirable traits in crops. CRISPR (Clustered Regular Interspaced Palindromic Repeats)/Cas9 (CRISPR- associated protein) is a recent breakthrough in gene editing technology. It can be utilized to exploit defensive mechanism in plants against pathogen attack with recognition and degradation of the invading pathogenic genes by bacterial immune system. Advances in plant breeding with integration of CRISPR/Cas9 have facilitated the production of cultivars with heritable resistance to viral and bacterial disease. CRISPR/Cas9 mediated genetically engineered resistance can be inherited to further generation of crops after segregation of Cas9/sgRNA transgene in F1 generation. The segregation of Cas9/sgRNA transgene prevents undesirable genome modification in successive generation and makes use of CRISPR/Cas9 safe in plant breeding. CRISPR/Cas9 proves itself as a fascinating tool to revolutionize plant breeding for the development of various disease resistant cultivars however, effects of CRISPR/Cas9 system on different physiological process of plants still needs to be studied.Int. J. Appl. Sci. Biotechnol. Vol 5(4): 403-409
Highlights
Protection of crop cultivar against existing pest and disease as well as improvement of crop cultivar from higher productivity standpoint is a major challenge
This review aims to facilitate researchers in further researches providing information in current advances in CRISPR/Cas9 and its use in resistance breeding
Ali et al (2015) performed experiment to demonstrate the efficacy of CRISPR/Cas9 against tomato yellow leaf curl virus (TYLCV) in Nicotiana benthamiana plants and their results exhibited profound evidence of interference against viral DNA by use of guide RNA mediated through Agrobacterium tumefaciens
Summary
Protection of crop cultivar against existing pest and disease as well as improvement of crop cultivar from higher productivity standpoint is a major challenge. Plant breeding for pests, disease resistance and higher productivity helps in the development of disease resistant crop cultivars safeguarding food security (Melchers & Stuiver, 2000). Different genome editing and advanced molecular techniques with transgenic plants are integrated with plant breeding to achieve improved crop cultivar with enhanced resistance to pest and diseases, termed as resistance breeding. To exploit the concept of resistance breeding, creation of genetic variation with the enhancement of resistance against pathogenic genes is an indispensable part (Van den Bulk, 1991). In light of these facts, different gene
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